Kafka e i kafkiani

To write aphorisms is to partake of “a minor art of the intellectual asthma,” Austrian author Thomas Bernhard once wrote, “from which certain people, above all in France, have lived and still live, so-called half philosophers for nurses’ night tables…whose sayings eventually find their way onto the walls of every dentist’s waiting room.” The most common complaint among revisionist biographers and doting critics of Franz Kafka is that, in the eighty-odd years since his death, the deification of the writer has reduced his work to the level of the aphorism. If Kafka has not yet found his way onto the walls of every dentist’s waiting room, the photograph of his stony countenance and doleful eyes, so frequently invoked as a stand-in for his vision of the world, sometimes seems to be everywhere else […].